Red Cross confirms it lost some $6 million in Africa between 2014 and 2016 in fighting the ebola epidemic. Over $2 million of that went missing due to "likely collusion" between a few Red Cross employees and a few Sierra Leonian bank employees, when they "improperly fixed the exchange rate." That sounds pretty bankster to me, though I suppose real banksters would call someone stealing $2 million a piker.
A record number of folks signed up on the Obamacare exchanges on November 1 -- 200,000, or more than twice as many as last year. Those folks are generally re-uppers, not new customers, but it's still impressive. Donald Trump is no doubt trying to take credit for it as we speak -- and I guess he deserves some, for trying so hard to screw it up that it put the fear into people. It'll have a much shorter sign-up period, of course, so if fewer people sign up overall, I guess he'll talk about how it's "imploding."
ProPublica discusses "doxxing," or the practice of folks dropping your private information on the internet as a way of harassing you into silence. It happens to a lot of people who speak out (and, in the case of at least one white power rally non-attendee, some people who don't), and ProPublica provides a good primer on how to reduce the possibility it'll happen to you. You'll want to attend your Facebook privacy settings, of course, though the good news is you seem to have more power over them than you used to.
Twitter is doubling the character limit on its twitterings, from 140 to 280 characters, and I'll confess I'm a little sad. I found that the 140-character limit sharpened my writing (you missed my two-year run on Twitter? Don't worry, so did everyone else!), and I don't think Twitter's problems have very much to do with the character limit. Problem with Twitter is that it's hard to get noticed unless you act really, really obnoxiously, and I'm not sure that has to be a problem in a system with relatively little gatekeeping.
Finally, don't make too much of Mr. Trump's telling Japanese auto CEOs they ought to make their cars in the U.S., mere seconds after acknowledging that they already do. Republicans act stupidly in order to make you think they're more stupid than evil, and Mr. Trump's only the latest practitioner of that art. His votaries will cleave to him harder, not just because they love ball-swinging displays, but because they love bashing the press after the press bashes their hero. As a civilization, we have to do better -- particularly since I could have written the previous sentence about George W. Bush 13 years ago without changing a word.
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